During Jan. 12 to 15, 2017, the Tenth Annual Meeting of the Political Economy of International Organizations was held in Universität Bern in Switzerland. It’s among the top meeting in international political economy area. SPEA teachers Chen Jia and Fang Jing attended the meeting and published their papers Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs): The Global Investment Regime and Income Inequality in Developing Countries and Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs): The Global Investment Regime and Income Inequality in Developing Countries (cooperated with Professor Cristina Bodea from Michigan State University).
After the meeting, two teachers had deep feelings. Presented experts proposed very constructive suggestions for the paper improvement. For Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs): The Global Investment Regime and Income Inequality in Developing Countries, Professor Timm Betz from Texas A&M University pointed out that, the mentioned outlines were feasible separately, yet the framing may cause confusion. So his suggestion is to highlight the outline in the very beginning. Professor Damian Raess from University of Reading doubted that whether the relation between Time Horizon and BITs would conditional some domestic factors like welfare state. For Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs): The Global Investment Regime and Income Inequality in Developing Countries, Professor Ryan Brutger raised some suggestions on the framing, and he also pointed out that we should take into consideration of the influence of Foreign Direct Investment, because BITs may influence foreign direct investment mechanism. Valentin Lang from Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg commented on the organization that the first part and main analysis is to demonstrate how BITs influence uneven income distribution while the second part is to study the causal mechanisms, mainly including fiscal income and labor rights. Other presented experts also raised some constructive comments, including Tobias Hifmann from University of Utah, Chia-yi Lee and Su-Hyun Lee from Nanyang Technological University, Meredith Wilf from University of Pittsburgh, and Peter Rossendorff from New York University.
During the meeting, our teachers talked with professors through out the world, learned frontier and hot researches in international political economy area, exchanged with scholars from World Trade Institute, establishing good cooperation foundation for future fieldwork in China.